So Tell Me Something I Didn't Know

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A couple highlights:

"We're producing too many people," Mr. Steele said, "many of them poorly trained or moved into the field without the connections or relationships necessary to make their transition to a career possible. It's as if medical school were graduating people without giving them internships at a hospital."

"Twenty years ago, you didn't sense the kind of urgency these kids have now," said Mr. Schlegel, who represents many successful New York theater actors, including Jefferson Mays and Jayne Atkinson. "Now they think if they don't get signed by an agent right away, they've failed. They never think they've got to learn the ropes a bit, get seasoned. They want to know, 'Where's my TV series? Where's my film audition?' It's wrong, of course, but that's what they think, and in a business where we fall all over the young ones, you can't blame them."

Sometimes it's easy to forget that in show business, and in the greater scheme of life, a year is really not a very long amount of time. The other day I was sitting with one of my friends and talking about the fact that it had been 3-4 years since we had graduated, which is both a fair and an insignificant amount of time. Fair in the sense that since then, both of us have done a number of projects, good and bad, and insignificant in the sense that there is still so much potentially ahead of us.

It always shocks me when I talk to people living back in Toronto about the state of affairs back there; the handful of people I've spoken to make it sound so easy to get a call from an agent, when I've never had so much as a sniff from one here. Not even a, "Quit sending us your shit, we're not interested," note. A part of that is because being on the visa I'm on, I can't really do a whole lot of paying jobs at the moment, so I haven't been able to capitalize on Morty's as much as I might have liked to. Hopefully I'll be able to change that next year, when I FINALLY finish up my BA (9 years after finishing high school, awesome!) and get off a student visa or get deported.

I also find it helpful sometimes to remember a quote I read in this big Julliard book that details the history of the school and is loaded with quotes from alumni. It's a quote from Kevin Kline, and it goes a little something like: "When I graduated from Julliard I knew how much there was that I didn't know, and that's all any school can give you."

In general when it comes to education, the idea that once you're out of school you're "done" learning is the worst thing you can think. You have to always be pushing yourself because if you don't, no-one else will. That's why so many of the people I went to school with have left the city, because they couldn't handle that part of it. It's difficult, because you need to be honest with yourself and evaluate how your career is progressing, but you also need to determine whether or not this is really something you must pursue, if you could not be happy doing anything else in life. Me, I don't really know. Right now, yes, this is what I have to be doing. But a year from now, or 5 years from now that could change. You have to be open to that possibility, just as you have to be open to the opportunities that will come your way.

I have to keep believing that opportunities will come, or I'd probably quit and go home. Hell, I've already had opportunities come my way, and I'm grateful. Now if only I could convince my parents, I'd be set.